This weekend, five days after a cop knelt on George Floyd's neck in bright daylight on a Minneapolis street, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement.
Either he took five days to toss a meaningless word salad, or he belatedly realized that he was among the last sports leaders to have failed to acknowledge the killing, and on Saturday quickly tossed a meaningless word salad.
I could reprint Goodell's statement here, but it might be easier for you to just Google "Generic press release template."
Ignore Goodell. He facilitated the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick, who was peacefully protesting killings just like that of George Floyd, and he has failed to persuade NFL owners to hire a reasonable number of black coaches and general managers in a sport filled with high-achieving black men. He possesses the same credibility as a new Twitter user with zero followers and a Russian handle.
Instead, today, read the piece written by Joe Lockhart for CNN.com. Lockhart worked as an NFL executive. He also worked in the White House.
Lockhart's essay exposes all that Goodell and NFL owners have tried to obscure — that Kaepernick remained unsigned because NFL teams didn't want to anger portions of their fan base or bring unwanted media attention to their locker rooms.
Lockhart writes that he thought the NFL did good work in trying to encourage discussions about race and protest, and that Goodell at least had good intentions. "Though Kaepernick didn't get his job back, I thought we had done a righteous job, considering."
If that was the culmination of Lockhart's piece, he would have exposed himself as exactly the kind of self-congratulatory and cloistered NFL figure who has kept the league's worldview rooted firmly in the 1950s.